Building a High Definition Home Theater PC

The MyHD HDTV card represents everything that’s both right and wrong with the PC as a home theater device. The MyHD 120 offers a great deal of flexibility, like many PC devices, but gets tripped up by it. For example, the user interface for setting up the card seems to be a relatively poor clone of ATI’s pre-8.5 software. The screens are cluttered, and the designer seems to have assumed that the user would understand all that nifty DTV jargon.

For example, there are two different screens for the display  one for “AV setup” and the other for “VGA setup”. However, the AV setup is where the resolution of your output device is set. The VGA setup screen defines how you want the MyHD playback window to appear on your monitor. Confused yet?

If you’re not confused, or if you assume that you’ll really only use these preferences screens once anyway, then the capture setup screen may cause your to brain lock up hard. There are endless sets of options and no real guide as to which is best. Further, there seems to be no option for capturing at full 720P or 1080i resolutions; the best offered is 720×480, or enhanced DTV resolution. You can, however, set file sizes to greater than 2GB, which is a good thing  capture files can grow huge pretty quickly.

HD Capture ConsiderationsThe primary reason for using a PCI HDTV card is for time-shifting your HDTV viewing (PVR functionality) and archiving your favorite high definition shows. Secondarily, you can use the MyHD 120 to capture analog TV as well. If you use an IR blaster solution, you can even capture from a digital cable or satellite TV box, but that will be analog only.

The native capture format for HDTV signals is an HDTV transport stream, and has the file suffix ‘.tp’. The transport stream contains both the digital video and audio signals, which then need to be demultiplexed for playback. You can play back .TP files in the MyHD player software, which resembles most TV tuner card software on the surface.

It’s also possible to play back a .tp file in some DVD player software, such as WinDVD 5.0. You can perform analog capture to an AVI file that can be played back in Windows Media Player. Perhaps the single most confusing aspect of all this is to properly set up the video and audio codecs so that you use codecs that actually exist on your system. Otherwise, you may get audio, but no video or vice versa. Much depends on your sound hardware and the video codecs installed.

What about scheduling playback? MyHD uses TitanTV as its primary TV guide. The good news is that MyHD is well-integrated with TitanTV, and you can set up one-click recording of shows.

If you use the option to download up to eight days of guide information to your local PC, you can also use the guide software within MyHD 120’s on-screen display (OSD) when in full screen, HD mode.

The bad news is that you need to first set up a favorite show list within TitanTV before you can download the information, but this is a one-time task. TitanTV’s user interface is more streamlined since the last time we took a look at it nearly a year ago. The pop-up screens for scheduling are easy to understand, once you get used to the fairly tiny icons.

The downside is that when you schedule a show, you end up inside a MyHD scheduling dialog, which looks completely different than the cleaner TitanTV interface.

Once you get used to the system, recording shows is a straightforward process. What’s not straightforward is what occurs afterwards.

The first thing you encounter is an unfortunate bug in MyHD that will sometimes cause it to lock up during recording if you have a Hyper-Threaded CPU and have Hyper-Threading enabled. This affects many current generation Pentium 4 systems. The second problem you encounter occurs during playback. Playing back transport stream files we recorded was an iffy process. Sometimes we’d get a black screen within the MyHD player, although the time indicator would be moving. Sometimes we’d get video, but no audio. Sometimes the system would lock up hard. Note that we were using the 1.61 software, so it wasn’t an issue of running an old revision. Macro Image Technology has been releasing software updates at a steady pace, but we certainly haven’t been encouraged by the lack of stability in the record and playback software.

HDTV Viewing ConsiderationsThe MyHD 120 card worked quite well as an HDTV source, but viewing perfection was still somewhat elusive. Initially, we used the DVI daughtercard, but the DVI connection on the Samsung DLP TV fed oddball information to the PC system as to its capabilities. The upshot was that if you want to use DVI, you’ll need to download a utility such as Powerstrip in order to tweak your monitor timings. It’s a labor-intensive effort, but you’ll eventually be rewarded by a great looking picture.

If you have a 1080i (but not 720p) capable TV, the users over at AVSForum have put a substantial amount of effort into setting up 1080i timings for powerstrip. However, for owners of Samsung TVs who simply want to plug and go, there’s an easier solution.

Use the Samsung’s VGA input.

It may seem like a step backward to use an analog connection to view digital television that’s running on a PC, but this worked “out-of-the-box” for us. The one thing we did need to do was to use Powerstrip to allow for 1280×720 resolution on ATI hardware. The Catalyst 3.6 drivers we tested didn’t have a built-in setting for 1280×720. Alternatively, you can use Rage3D Tweak, which is a bit simpler to use than Powerstrip. If you’re using an Nvidia graphics card, then you’ll get 1280×720 as an available resolution in the last few driver releases.

In either case, viewing HDTV content was stunning. We caught a Tory Amos concert on the local PBS feed, and the image quality was amazing when compared to standard TV.

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